Any Muslim can benefit
from reading hadiths from al-Bukhari and Muslim, whether on his own
or with others. As for studying hadith, Sheikh Shuayb al-Arnaut, with whom
my wife and I are currently reading Imam al-Suyuti's Tadrib al-rawi
[The training of the hadith narrator], emphasizes that the science of hadith
deals with a vast and complex literature, a tremendous sea of information
that requires a pilot to help one navigate, without which one is bound
to run up on the rocks. In this context, Sheikh Shuayb once told us, "Whoever
doesn't have a sheikh, the Devil is his sheikh, in any Islamic discipline."

In other words, there are benefits
the ordinary Muslim can expect from personally reading hadith, and benefits
that he cannot, unless he is both trained and uses other literature, particularly
the classical commentaries that explain the hadiths meanings and their
relation to Islam as a whole.

The benefits one can derive from
reading al-Bukhari and Muslim are many: general knowledge of such fundamentals
as the belief in Allah, the messengerhood of the Prophet (Allah bless him
and give him peace), the Last Day and so on; as well as the general moral
prescriptions of Islam to do good, avoid evil, perform the prayer, fast
Ramadan, and so forth. The hadith collections also contain many other interesting
points, such as the great rewards for acts of worship like the midmorning
prayer (duha), the night vigil prayer (tahajjud), fasting
on Mondays and Thursdays, giving voluntary charity, and So on. Anyone who
reads these and puts them into practice in his life has an enormous return
for reading hadith, even more so if he aims at perfecting himself by attaining
the noble character traits of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him
peace) mentioned in hadith. Whoever learns and follows the prophetic example
in these matters has triumphed in this world and the next.

What is not to be hoped for in reading
hadith (without personal instruction from a sheikh for some time) is two
things: to become an alim or Islamic scholar, and to deduce fiqh
(Islamic jurisprudence) from the hadiths on particulars of sharia
practice.

Without a guiding hand, the untrained
reader will misunderstand many of the hadiths he reads, and these mistakes,
if assimilated and left uncorrected, may pile up until he can never find
his way out of them, let alone become a scholar. Such a person is particularly
easy prey for modern sectarian movements of our times appearing in a neo-orthodox
guise, well financed and published, quoting Quran and hadiths to the uninformed
to make a case for the basic contention of all deviant sects since the
beginning of Islam; namely, that only they are the true Muslims. Such movements
may adduce, for example, the well-authenticated (hasan) hadith related
from Aisha (Allah be well pleased with her) by al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi that
the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, Shirk (polytheism)
is more hidden in my Umma than the creeping of ants across a great smooth
stone on a black night . . . (Nawadir al-usul fi marifa ahadith al-Rasul.
Istanbul 1294/1877. Reprint. Beirut: Dar Sadir, n.d., 399).

This hadith has been used by sects
from the times of the historical Wahhabi movement down to the present to
convince common people that the majority of Muslims may not actually be
Muslims at all, but rather mushrikin or polytheists, and that those
who do not subscribe to the views of their sheikhs may be beyond the pale
of Islam.

In reply, traditional scholars point
out that the words fi Ummati, "in my Umma" in the hadith plainly
indicate that what is meant here is the lesser shirk of certain sins that,
though serious, do not entail outright unbelief. For the word shirk
or polytheism has two meanings. The first is the greater polytheism of
worshipping others with Allah, of which Allah says in surat al-Nisa,
"Truly, Allah does not forgive that any should be associated with Him
[in worship], but forgives what is other than that to whomever He wills"
(Quran 4:48), and this is the shirk of unbelief. The second is the
lesser polytheism of sins that entail shortcomings in one's tawhid
or knowledge of the divine unity, but do not entail leaving Islam. Examples
include affection towards someone for the sake of something that is wrongdoing
(called shirk because one hopes to benefit from what Allah has placed
no benefit in), or disliking someone because of something that is right
(called shirk because one apprehends harm from what Allah has placed
benefit in), or the sin of showing off in acts of worship, as mentioned
in the sahih or rigorously authenticated hadith that the Prophet
(Allah bless him and give him peace) said, The slightest bit of showing
off in good works isshirk (al-Mustadrak ala al-Sahihayn.
4 vols. Hyderabad, 1334/1916. Reprint (with index vol. 5). Beirut: Dar
al-Marifa, n.d.,1.4). Such sins do not put one outside of Islam, though
they are disobedience and do show a lack of faith (iman).

Scholars say that the lesser shirk
of such sins is meant by the hadith, for if the greater shirk of
unbelief were intended, the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace)
would not have referred to such individuals as being in my Umma,
since unbelief (kufr) is separate and distinct from Islam, and necessarily
outside of it. This is also borne out by another version of the hadith
related from Abu Bakr (Nawadir al-usul, 397), which has fikum
or "among you" in place of the words "in my Umma", a direct reference to
the Sahaba or prophetic Companions, none of whom was a mushrik or
idolator, by unanimous consensus (ijma) of all Muslim scholars.
As for sins of lesser shirk, it cannot be lost on anyone why their
hiddenness is compared in the hadith to the imperceptible creeping of ants
across a great smooth stone on a black night; namely, because of the subtlety
of human motives, and the ease with which human beings can deceive themselves.

Similarly, al-Bukhari relates that
the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said: "Truly, you shall
follow the ways of those who were before you, span by span, and cubit by
cubit, until, if they were to enter a lizards lair, you would follow them."
We said, "O Messenger of Allah, the Jews and Christians?" And he said,
"Who else?" (Sahih al-Bukhari. 9 vols. Cairo 1313/1895. Reprint
(9 vols. in 3). Beirut: Dar al-Jil, n.d., 9.126: 7320).

This hadith is also used by modern
movements claiming to be a return to the Quran and sunna, to suggest that
the majority of ordinary Sunni Muslims who follow the aqida (tenets
of faith) or fiqh of mainstream orthodox Sunni Imams (whose classic
works seldom fully correspond with their views) are intended by this hadith,
while there is much evidence that the orthodox majority of the Umma is
divinely protected from error, such as the sahih hadith related
by al-Hakim that "Allah's hand is over the group, and whoever diverges
from them diverges to hell" (al-Mustadrak, 1.116). Such hadiths
show that Quranic verses like "If you obey most of those on earth, they
will lead you astray from the path of Allah" (Quran, 6:116) do not
refer to those who follow traditional Islamic scholarship (who have never
been a majority of those on earth), but rather the non-Muslim majority
of mankind.

It is fitter to regard the previously-mentioned
hadiths wording of following the Jews and Christians as referring, in our
times, to the Muslims who copy the West in all aspects of their lives,
rational and irrational, even to the extent of building banks in Muslim
cities and holy places never before sullied by usury (riba) on an
institutional basis since pre-Islamic times. Or those who promote divisive
sectarian ideologies under the guise of reform movements among the Muslims,
as the Jews and Christians did in their respective religions.

Traditional scholarship is protected
from such misguidance by the authentic knowledge it has preserved, living
teacher from living teacher, in unbroken succession back to the Prophet
(Allah bless him and give him peace). To return to our question, without
such a quality control process, the unaided reader of hadith cannot hope
to become a sort of homemade alim, giving fatwas on the basis of
what he finds in al-Bukhari or Muslim alone, because the sahih hadiths
related to Islamic legal questions are by no means found only in these
two works, but in a great many others, which those who issue judgements
on these questions must know. I have mentioned elsewhere some of the sciences
needed by the scholar to join between all the hadiths, and that some hadiths
condition each other or are conditioned by more general or more specific
hadiths or Quranic verses that bear on the question. Without this knowledge,
and a traditional sheikh to learn it from, one must necessarily stumble,
something I know because I have personally tried.

When I first came to Jordan in 1980,
someone had impressed upon my mind that a Muslim needs nothing besides
the Quran and sahih hadiths. After reading through the Arabic Quran with
the aid of A.J. Arberry's Koran Interpreted and recording what I
understood, I sat down with the Muhammad Muhsin Khan translation of Sahih
al-Bukhari and went through all the hadiths, volume by volume, writing
down everything they seemed to tell a Muslim to do. It was an effort to
cut through the centuries of accretions to Islam that orientalists had
taught me about at the University of Chicago, an effort to win through
to pure Islam from the original sources themselves. My Salafism and my
orientalism converged on this point.

At length, I produced a manuscript
of selected hadiths of al-Bukhari, a sort of do-it-yourself sharia
manual. I still use it as an index to hadiths in al-Bukhari, though the
fiqh conclusions of my amateur ijtihads are now rather embarrassing.
When hadiths were mentioned that seemed to contradict each other, I would
simply choose whichever I wanted, or whichever was closer to my Western
habits. After all, I said, the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace)
was never given a choice between two matters except that he chose the easier
of the two (Sahih al-Bukhari, 4.230: 3560). For example, I had been
told that it was not sunna to urinate while standing up, and had heard
the hadith of Aisha that anyone who says the Prophet (Allah bless him and
give him peace) passed urine while standing up, do not believe him (Musnad
al-Imam Ahmad. 6 vols. Cairo 1313/1895. Reprint. Beirut: Dar Sadir,
n.d., 6.136). But then I read the hadith in al-Bukhari that the Prophet
(Allah bless him and give him peace) once urinated while standing up (Sahih
al-Bukhari, 1.66: 224), and decided that what I had first been told
was a mistake, or that perhaps it did not matter much. Only later, when
I began translating the Arabic of the Shafi'i fiqh manual Reliance
of the Traveller did I find out how the scholars of sharia
had combined the implications of these hadiths; that the standing of the
Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) to pass urine was to teach
the Umma that it was not unlawful (haram), but rather merely offensive
(makruh)--though in relation to the Prophet such actions were not
offensive, but rather obligatory to do at least once to show the Umma they
were not unlawful--or according to other scholars, to show it was permissible
in situations in which it would prevent urine from spattering one's clothes.

These facts speak eloquently as to
the role of hadith in the sharia in the eyes of these Imams, for
whom it was not a matter of practicing either fiqh or hadith, as some Muslims
seriously suggest today, but rather, the fiqh of hadith embodied
in the traditional madhhabs which they followed. There would seem
to be room for many of us to benefit from their example.